Book Review: Ramona and Her Father

A Fair Trade Book (incredible!)

(There have been several reprintings of this book. This is not the one I physically own. As usual, readers who don't insist on one particular edition will get whichever edition is available.)

Title: Ramona and Her Father

Author: Beverly Cleary

Author's web site: http://beverlycleary.com/

Date: 1977

Publisher: Scholastic

ISBN: 0-439-14806-5

Length: 186 pages

Illustrations: line drawings by Alan Tiegreen

Quote: “Girls, you might as well know. Your father has lost his job.”

Ramona Quimby has enjoyed a pleasant day in second grade and is making out a Christmas wish list when the recession of the late 1970s catches up with the Quimby family. Her father has been downsized. Her mother will have to go to work. There will be fewer treats. Her father will spend more time at home; his cigarette smoking will annoy his wife and children more; when he stops smoking to save money he’ll be grumpy and backslide.

For several of Ramona’s fans, this was the volume in which Ramona went from being a character they enjoyed laughing at to being a character they could relate to. Not all readers appreciated the transition, although, when the Henry/Beezus/Ramona books were made into a television series in the mid-1980s, the more contemporary stories in this book were featured; Henry’s carrying a big dog like Ribsy in an open crate on the bus, all by himself without adult supervision, already seemed like something that might have happened a long time ago...

Ramona thinks she’d like to help the family by earning money. How do kids her age earn money? The only way she’s seen them doing that lately is by acting in TV commercials. Ramona practices acting and gets into a mess.

Beezus has to interview an older person and write a story the person told her for a school writing assignment. Ramona and neighbor Howie decide to have some frugal fun making the kind of toy the old lady describes. More mess, and this time they mortify Beezus’s early-adolescent selfconciousness, as well, singing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall"—“People will think we guzzle beer,” Beezus whines.

Everything reaches a hilarious and happy ending at Christmas. (Is it fair, when the cover of the story doesn’t mention Christmas, that to the extent this book is a novel its climax involves a Christmas play? Ramona and Her Father is every bit as much of a Christmas story as The Shepherd the Angel and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog.)

What’s the best age to read the Ramona books? I discovered Ramona the Pest when Ramona was five and I was seven; Ramona was funny enough that I didn’t mind reading about a younger child. Now I’m over fifty and, when I reread Ramona and Her Father for this review, a funny scene I’d forgotten made me laugh out loud again. Quite a few adults laugh at this series, although the Henry/Beezus/Ramona series are “chapter books” for primary-school-level readers, rather than picture books or short novels, so adults who enjoy these books seem to find it useful to explain to other adults that they’re buying the books for a child. Bosh. I won’t tell if you don’t. If you missed this series as a child and don’t have a child to give the books to, buy them for yourself and donate them to a school library after reading. They are that funny.

They’re funny enough to challenge five-year-old readers, too, to sound out words like “pumpkin” and “pajamas” and “affectionate.”

The reason why some bright children, who understand words like “affectionate” and know the letters of the alphabet, don’t curl up with books on wet afternoons is that they are going through a temporary farsighted stage that will correct itself before age ten if they’re not burdened with glasses. This bears mentioning in a review of a book by Beverly Cleary because she also wrote a book called Mitch and Amy, about fraternal twins who live in California rather than Oregon. In that story, Amy loves reading and acting out novels, and is already reading the Little House books at nine, but her twin brother Mitch can hardly spell out words...until one day he gets interested in a book and finds himself reading it.

Regular readers remember that, although we weren’t twins, my brother and I had a similar experience. I was the child prodigy who could spell out words, if not make sense out of them, in our pediatrician’s medical journals when I was three. My brother was the more “gifted” of us in some ways, but he was still reading a few pages of a long book, then asking someone to read the rest of it to him, up into age eight. Then on one rainy Saturday he picked up an adult-size novel (Zane Grey, as I recall), prepared to read six pages and try to get me to read the rest of it aloud, and just spent the whole morning reading the whole book. He’d been understanding books more sophisticated than Zane Grey for years, but eight was the age at which he became able to read a full-length book without eyestrain.

So if I knew a boy like Mitch, or even a girl like Mitch (girls grow up faster, but not always all that much faster)...I wouldn’t say anything. I’d just buy books by Beverly Cleary, Marjorie Weinman Sharmat, Jean Craighead George, Matt Christopher, and maybe Arthur Maxwell, and leave them lying about. Sooner or later a book will be funny, or interesting, or beautifully illustrated, enough to get a bright but slow-reading child to read. All books by Beverly Cleary are funny enough to be the one that changes a child’s life.

Cleary hasn't written a new book lately. I was quite sure she was dead when I typed this review into the system, but no, according to Bing, she's still alive--in between the typing of this review and its appearance on this web site, she'll be 102 years old. Awesome. That means any and all of her books, none of which is exactly new, can be bought here as Fair Trade Books: for most of them you'd pay $5 per book plus $5 per package (as many books as I can jam into the package) plus $1 per online payment, out of which this web site will send $1 per book to Cleary or the charity of her choice. Payment can be sent by U.S. postal order to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, or, if you want to order multiple books, by Paypal to the address you get from salolianigodagewi, as shown at the very bottom of the screen. To buy this book only, here's a new-style Paypal button: